This disclosure relates to optical scanning devices. Specifically, provided are systems and methods to clean the underside of a platen, as well as cool components, such as a light source and optical sensor, operatively associated with a scanning device.
Contamination of imaging stations associated with a document handler, such as a manual or document feeder, is a long standing problem. In particular, the platen glass area over which document sheets are manually or sequentially fed for scanning can become contaminated, such as by dirt, paper lint, ink, toner, etc., which can cause objectionable line or spots on a rendered image of the scanned document.
In addition, contamination of the underside of the platen glass area can also become contaminated by dust, dirt, ink, toner, etc., which also causes objectionable line or spots on a rendered image of the scanned document.
Recognition of the problems of imaging area contamination and partial electronic solutions are discussed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,393,161 and 6,522,431. An example of a typical CVT document feeding and imaging system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,534,989, 6,166,394, or 6,350,072, incorporated by reference herein, although not limited thereto. As shown therein an automatic CVT document feeder and imager may desirably be integrally combined with a large platen stationary document scanner for documents not desired to be fed through the CVT system, and the CVT system can use a small area of the same platen or a separate platen for its imaging station, and either can be lifted up to expose either of the two separate platen imaging areas. As described and shown therein, typically these units share the same scanning bar and scanning lamp unit, which moves under the CVT platen area during its CVT imaging operation, but moves over and parks on the opposite side of the large platen area provided for stationary document scanning whenever the platen cover, CVT unit, or both are opened, since that opening normally indicates that the user is planning to place a document for scanning on the large stationary document platen.
Currently, in order to clean the underside of an imaging platen, a service call needs to be placed, whereby a technician must remove the platen to manually clean the underside.
Needed is a more automatic method and system of cleaning the platen underside.